Seventeen

It's 1:38 in the morning and I've just finished washing my hair. First - it's damn humbling this lesson of one-handed everything, including the exponential amount of time it takes me to do...everything. Second - I believe there is a certain point, when midnight has curtseyed and left the stage and dawn is fewer hours away than the evening before, that it seems reasonable to continue on. Friday has arrived.

My sister is coming to visit for the weekend; my parents will join us on Saturday for a while. A strange, mid-summer meeting of the clan, this is. Different states, different lives, different orbits - joining around a table is nearly a feat of aligning planetary trajectories; there are calculations and preparations and intentions involved. Family is not friends, but more. Beneath the skin of casual life the pulse of where we came from echoes, the foundation supporting that which is now. How we parent and friend and love - these seeds were sown before we drew breath, planted by family.

I think of this when I watch my boys jostle and joke, when they pile into a car with pals and disappear into the sunset headed towards a world I exist in only as a touchstone. They always come home. But I know this is fleeting, lovely, fragile. Family is fragile. It is our anchor in the ocean, our path through the woods.

 Family is...are the bones beneath the flesh of us.